Table Of ContentThe Semantics of Science
ROY HARRIS
Continuum
The Semantics of Science
Related title
The Necessity of Artspeak – Roy Harris
The Semantics of
Science
ROY HARRIS
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Roy Harris 2005
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 08264 8450 6 (hardback)
08264 7847 6 (paperback)
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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books, Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1 Language and the Aristotelian scientist 5
2 Before and after Aristotle 25
3 Semantics and the Royal Society 47
4 Science in the kitchen 64
5 The rhetoric of linguistic science 83
6 Mathematics and the language of science 106
7 Science and common sense 129
8 Supercategory semantics 152
9 Integrating science 176
Appendix1 Einstein on science and reality 189
Appendix2 Heisenberg on language 202
References 209
Index 215
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Preface
Most of our science is a matter of inference.
Oliver Lodge, 1927
Every scientist [...] is constantly confronted with the problem of objective description of
experience, by which we mean unambiguous communication.
Niels Bohr, 1954
It is a major triumph of science to have evolved a language which is largely independent of
culture.
Colin Cherry, 1957
One of the drawbacks of writing about ‘the language of science’ is that it may
give rise to the false impression that the writer believes in the existence of
some single, monolithic language or form of discourse that is typically used
by all or most scientists. So it may be as well to enter straight away a dis-
claimer to the effect that I hold no such belief. My main concerns in this book
are not the grammatical and stylistic topics which seem to have preoccupied
others who have written on the language of science (e.g. Savory 1953,
Halliday 2004). I have nothing to say about such matters as nominalization in
scientific reports, or clause structure in the scientific sentence. Nor is my point
of departure the naive assumption that there actually is a linguistic variety we
can immediately recognize as, say, ‘scientific English’; let alone treat its
‘grammar’ as a subspecies of ‘English grammar’, or as an epiphenomenon
with respect to some better understood whole called ‘the English language’.
(One might as well suppose that there were distinct varieties of ‘tennis
English’, ‘Christian English’, ‘horticultural English’ or ‘railway English’.)
Exactly the same applies to French, Latin, Greek and other languages which
scientists have adopted or adapted for their own purposes. Beyond the
superficial language-specific question of what marks out the kind(s) of
vocabulary and syntax that scientists choose in order to write about their
work, there lies a much deeper question concerning the assumptions about
viii Preface
language that scientists make in their work. This is the area of my inquiry. It is
a common misconception to imagine that it falls within the professional
competence of linguists to describe the language of science ‘from the outside’;
that is, without ever themselves engaging directly with the question ‘What is sci-
ence?’. I do not think that is possible.
Most of the issues I wish to raise fall within an area roughly marked out by
the three pronouncements by eminent scientists of the twentieth century that I
have quoted above. I construe these as pointing to much wider questions
about the interface between scientific and linguistic inquiry.
At first sight there are many such questions. But perhaps in the end they
could be reduced to just two. If so, and in advance of any debate about how
precisely to define the words science and language, these two questions would
be:‘What does science require of language?’ and ‘What does language require
of science?’
In The Semantics of Science I embark on what may seem to amount to a
radical rethinking of science and scientific language; at least, science as under-
stood (or misunderstood) by many people of my generation, whether they
would have regarded themselves as scientists or not. One reason why my
perspective may be unfamiliar is that ‘the word science’, as commonly used for
the past hundred years or more, has been enlisted in the service of a way of
thinking about Nature and human inquiry that is quite different from that
adopted here. So I shall be contesting the received wisdom that emanates
jointly from Laboratories and Libraries. (By ‘Laboratories’ I mean the collect-
ivity of research institutions that support scientists, regardless of whether
they actually work in laboratories or not; and ‘Libraries’ I use as a convenient
term for all the dictionaries, textbooks and encyclopedias compiled under the
auspices of the current academic Establishment.)
My title The Semantics of Science calls for a preliminary explanation. ‘The
word semantics’, according to lexicographers, has a relatively short history:
‘the word science’ has a much longer and more complicated one. Semantics, we
are told, is an English version of the French sémantique, a term invented by the
French linguist Michel Bréal towards the end of the nineteenth century (Wolf
1991: 3–17). Science, on the other hand, is derived ultimately from the Latin
scientia; but who coined the word scientia, and in what context, lexicographers
do not know. One connexion between semantics and science that I am inter-
ested in relates to the way in which Bréal, and many others after him, chose to
define the inquiry that he baptized in pseudo-Greek fashion as sémantique
(from the verb semaino‘to signify’). It was, he said, the ‘science of meanings’
(science des significations).
When Bréal published his Essai de sémantique in 1897, science already
belonged among the prestigious conceptual supercategories in terms of which
the intellectual life of the modern world is organized. Every new branch of
Preface ix
academic inquiry seeks to establish its own credentials by reference to one or
other of the supercategories. Each of these supercategories in turn has its own
rhetoric, assiduously cultivated by those who thereby promote their own
interests and convictions. Science is no exception. Bréal was fully aware of
that when he claimed that semantics was a science. He did not feel called
upon to explain further in what sense semantics was scientific: the rhetorical
force of the term science alone was already sufficient for his purposes. It is
ironic that, for Bréal, the semantics of science was no more than a very small
component of the science of semantics.
It is virtually impossible to discuss the semantics of science without getting
caught up in the rhetoric of science; for the connexions between them are too
close. At the same time, I would not wish to overexpand the domain of rhet-
oric in the way some modern theorists have tried to do, so that it encompasses
‘the study of all areas of symbolic activity’ (Bazerman 1988: 7). That move in
rhetorical empire-building seems to me to blur, for no good reason, a number
of useful distinctions. Nor am I interested, as Bazerman is, in the study of the
scientific publication as a ‘literary genre’. (In this connexion, I should perhaps
point out that although Bazerman refers to ‘integrative machinery’ and ‘inte-
grative apparatus’ in scientific writing, the reader should not suppose that
this alludes in any way to integration as a theoretical concept in linguistics.
See further below.) I am not proposing to give scientists lessons in how to
write more persuasively. What I am concerned with under the heading of
rhetoric are the public claims that scientists make on behalf of science. For
these, whether justifiable or not, colour what the general public understands
science to be. Furthermore, ‘explaining’ science to the public has now become
a full-time occupation for certain writers, journalists and academics, whose
efforts have gone a long way towards institutionalizing the rhetoric to which I
refer. There are even university courses advertised under the rubric ‘rhetoric
of science’; this is said to be an area of studies which ‘applies the tools of
classical rhetoric and literary criticism to texts and communication patterns in
the natural and social sciences’. It has all come out of ‘writing courses that are
routinely required of science and engineering students’ (Fuller 1999). Those
who ‘did their science’ in the days when no such writing courses were
required, or even contemplated, may well raise an eyebrow at the apparent
recycling of antiquated academic divisions (which already presupposes that,
unlike arts students, science students are in some respects illiterate); but this is
an issue I do not propose to explore further in the following chapters. It
deserves a book to itself.
What I take the rhetoric of science to involve is in any case much more
complicated than that. One complication is that few of us nowadays know
whether we are getting our ‘scientific information’ at first hand, second hand,
or forty-ninth hand. To take a simple example, Mr Overweight who visits the
